Authors: David Samuels
“I remember asking, ‘Alexi, your bed’s always made up very neatly, do you get up and
make it every day or what?’” Richardson said.
“No,” Santana answered. “I sleep on the floor.”
Next to Santana’s bed was a picture of a skier kicking out his legs and raising a curtain of powdered white snow in front of the camera. Richardson was curious about the picture, too.
“So who’s the photo of,” he asked.
“Oh, it’s me,” Santana answered.
“How did you get someone to take a photo like that?” Richardson wondered.
“Oh, I was doing some stuff, doing some stunts.”
“What were you doing stunts for?
“A movie.”
Richardson also knew that his roommate was an exceptionally gifted student who had
cracked the curve on an exam for a required class in chemistry that notoriously gave freshmen fits. According to the results posted for that exam, Santana’s score was fully two standard deviations above the mean. “Those tests are written for babies,” Santana told him. “Princeton babies their students. It’s incredibly easy.”
Such attention-seeking comments were rare. Santana avoided direct eye contact when he
spoke. His room was bare of pictures of friends or family He didn’t have a photograph of his mother who had died of leukemia in Switzerland the previous year, and no one from outside the university ever called him or wrote. Still, he rarely seemed lonely. He turned the closet in his room into a wine cellar and hosted wine and cheese parties for groups of eight or ten freshmen women, whom he regaled with stories of his adventures living and working in exotic places. His roommates were not invited to his parties. With his mature demeanor and sophisticated tastes, he soon earned the nickname Sexy Alexi.
The stories that Richardson heard from his classmates were even wilder. Santana had
skied in the Olympics. He had dropped from a helicopter and turned double back flips in a Peter Markle ski comedy called
Hot Dog
. He had built a powerful computer from scratch. As Princeton freshmen engaged in a class-wide game of telephone, the stories returned to
Richardson with even more outlandish details, some of which even turned out to be true. A
freshman named Jill Williford and her friends rented
Hot Dog
one evening and watched the movie through until the end, where they saw their famous classmate’s name in the credits. He had come to Princeton, he told anyone who would listen, in order to find a wife.
Santana was not particularly friendly with Ben Richardson, and he seems to have actively
avoided any opportunities for conversation with his other roommate, Avshalom Yotam. Years
later, Yotam would remember only that the person he shared a suite with for a year was an
orphan, that he kept the door to his room closed, and that he often wore odd-looking or ragged clothes.
“I picture him as sort of small-framed, a little bit hunched over,” he later remembered.
“He was in very good physical shape. But he always walked hunched over, with his long hair
sort of hiding his face. So you never really saw his face, even when he was right there in front of you.”
Communication between the two roommates was so slight that Yotam would later
remember that during the course of two semesters they had had only one conversation that lasted longer than thirty seconds.
“I remember pretty distinctly lying on the couch in the common room, and at some point,
either he asked me or it somehow came up, and I told him that I was from Palo Alto,” he said.
“You know, Palo Alto is a really nice place,” Santana remarked.
“Oh, have you been there?”
“Yes, I’ve been there,” he answered. “It’s a really nice place.”
Yotam tried to get his roommate to expand on his impressions of his hometown and
whatever time he might have spent there, but Santana didn’t want to talk. He was a private
person, he said. They never spoke about Palo Alto again. As far as Yotam can remember, his
roommate never spoke to him again on any subject for the rest of the year.
Under most ordinary circumstances, the desire for privacy is unattainable for most
Princeton freshmen, who sleep two to a room in aging accommodations that have little in
common with the glossy pictures in the admissions brochures. Santana would realize his desire thanks to a tragic accident involving a fourth roommate, Austin Nahm. The day after he arrived at Princeton, Nahm had left campus on a freshman outdoor orientation trip, was hit by a speeding truck, and died. When Santana heard that his roommate was dead, he broke down and cried for perhaps ten minutes.
Reporters soon arrived at room 141, and the university sent counselors to help the three
remaining roommates cope with the shock. But although Santana’s emotions ran deep, he
showed no inclination to talk to reporters or to share his feelings in any therapeutically approved way. Perhaps he was moved by the senseless death of someone so young, or perhaps he was
feeling the stress of maintaining his invented self. Perhaps he felt some guilt that his roommate was dead while he himself lived on in borrowed clothing. Or perhaps his uncharacteristically emotional response had something to do with another consequence of the accident: for the rest of the year, as he went to classes and made new friends, alive to the possibility that at any moment the mask could slip and reveal his true face, Alexi Santana would have a single room at
Princeton all to himself.
VI. The Legend of Alexi Santana
Looking back years later, members of the Princeton Class of 1993 understood the story of
Alexi Santana as a puzzling crime, as an abuse of the admissions process, or as a weird
occurrence that had little to do with their own lives. Some expressed compassion for their former classmate. All remembered that they had been fooled. They told his story to strangers on
airplanes, to girls they asked out to dinner, and to friends from Princeton who knew the story, too. The story of Alexi Santana would continue to shadow their lives long after they left
Princeton. It was something that the Class of ‘93 shared in common. All remembered that they had been fooled.
When I first corresponded with Christine Zandliviet by e-mail she was working for the
Office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina. She had arrived at Princeton early her freshman year for a foreign-student orientation program when she met Santana, who told her
about his mother, who was living in Switzerland. “He mentioned something about Interlaken,
and something about Basel,” she remembered. “But he was never specific, like he didn’t want to be pinned down into saying where his mother was physically, in which sanitorium, or where he had traveled in Switzerland. I myself had been living in Geneva, and had traveled around, and so I wanted to share some experiences.”
It was strange that Santana didn’t seem to know elementary words in German or French.
Still, his manner was always calm and relaxed, in a way that made it easy to picture him as the child of hippie parents.
“In a way he was quite a loner. But in a way he was also very sociable. He was a very
flexible person. He could fade into a group and not stand out.”
•
Elizabeth Eaton is an attorney with Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer, a law firm in northern
New Jersey.
“I remember one evening when we were watching the news with a bunch of other people
in the Rocky common room,” she says, using familiar shorthand for Rockefeller, one of the
university’s seven residential colleges. “And he mentioned that he didn’t have a television set where he grew up. The last news anchor that he remembered was Walter Cronkite.”
•
Peter Boodell works for Flemings U.S., the American division of the venerable British
bank. He remembered attending a party in Alexis room one evening. Noticing a large number of books arrayed on the shelves, he asked his host where they were from.
“He replied with the usual ‘I was self-taught,’ along with some colorful details of where
he studied—some beach or something as an orphan. I started looking through one, and there was a different person’s name inside the cover. I asked him about it (he was standing right there), since he said they were his books. He quickly took the book from me and put it back on the
bookshelf, told me it was a used book, and asked me not to look through his other things.”
•
Orin Kerr graduated from the Tower Hill School in Delaware. His father was a professor
at Princeton. “I think the world we live in is pretty well tracked,” he told me when we spoke in Manhattan one afternoon. The world to which he refers is an orderly place where the graduates of elite schools go on to elite graduate schools and then to jobs at elite law firms, and become members of elite clubs. He remembered watching from the bay window of his room in Holder
Hall as Alexi Indris-Santana was tapped for Ivy, the oldest and most illustrious of Princeton’s elite eating clubs and the former haunt of James Baker and Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia.
“Two guys came and they picked him, and I guess tapped him,” Kerr said, using the
language that describes the hoped-for culmination of the selection process for the elite clubs, which is known as “bicker”—“and they rushed him out into the courtyard, and poured
champagne over his head, and gave him an Ivy hat. And he was screaming and was obviously
very excited. And I remember being struck that it was kind of a funny thing, because he really didn’t fit the stereotype of someone who would be in Ivy.”
A surviving picture of Hogue at the Ivy Club shows a clean-cut young man in a
houndstooth jacket, a white button-down shirt, and a silk rep tie. The long hair was gone. His classmates talked about him as a likely candidate for a Rhodes scholarship. With his high grades, his athletic ability, his membership in Ivy, and his remarkable personal story, it was hard to imagine a more likely candidate.
•
Brian Sax is a regional vice president for American Communications Network, a network
marketing company in California. He was friends with Santana from the track team, where they were the only two runners with long hair.
“He would deflect any conversation about his past by either asking another question or by
saying something totally random. You’d be having a conversation, and the conversation would be going that way, and all of a sudden you’d be talking about something totally different. We’d be talking about track, and if the conversation went in a direction he didn’t like, then all of a sudden you’d be talking about Madagascar.”
•
Barbi Friedan lives in Princeton. Her manner with adults is fearful, nervous, and almost
rabbit-like. She speaks in a soft, high voice that is perfectly pitched for soothing children and reading stories at bedtime. Her husband, Robert Friedan, is a professor of linguistics at Princeton and was Alexi Santana’s faculty advisor. He liked Santana because he was less interested in grades than in learning something new. She liked Santana because he was intelligent and shy, and because he was a good influence on her younger son, Bernie, who liked exploring storm
drains and engaging in other adventures that frightened his mother. Bernie Friedan worshipped Santana, who had lived on a ranch and slept outdoors, and who told him which storm drains were safe.
Barbi often invited Santana to have dinner at her house in Princeton. On one particularly
hot afternoon, she remembered, the air conditioner wasn’t working right. Santana got a hose, climbed up on the roof, and sprayed the roof with water to bring the temperature down. He
stayed up there for a very long time. When Barbi Friedan walked outside, she was startled to see the hot summer mist rising in waves off the roof of her house.
VII. Boulder
The barefoot runner from Nevada never seemed to realize his promise as a track star at
Princeton. While he ran outstanding times in practice, his performance was hampered by
nagging, mysterious ailments that often cropped up a day or two before meets, and which he
blamed on the poor training regimens designed by Larry Ellis. There were other members of the tight-knit Princeton track team who shared Santana’s individualistic approach to training and the belief that they could run better times on their own. Still, Santana seemed to be hanging back in races where he might have pushed himself harder. While his performance improved in the spring of his freshman year, he kept pulling up lame before big races against other Ivy League
universities, where lots of fans and reporters were likely to attend.
Brian Sax, the other runner on the team with long hair, understood Santana’s behavior as
an expression of his hatred for authority and his refusal to obey anyone else’s rules. An outsider himself, a native of Southern California with a taste for heavy metal music that the rest of the track team barely tolerated, Sax was struck by Santana’s low-key but unrelenting disdain for Ellis, the other track coaches, and his professors. When his coaches told him to walk to one side of the track at a meet, Santana crossed the track, walked over to a nearby fence, and refused to race—just to show that he could, Sax believed. In a geology class that he and Sax took together, Santana flatly refused to redo an assignment. Even more striking than Santana’s defiance was the absence of any consequences for his behavior. “They knew his background and they knew how
exceptional this person was, so they cut him slack,” Sax remembered. “It was Alexi versus
authority at Princeton, and Alexi won.”
Alexi Santana was special. Everyone on campus knew his story. If his performance on
the track left something to be desired, the self-educated runner from Nevada was doing
spectacularly well in his classes—earning straight As his first year. The fact that the consummate outsider was adjusting so well to social and academic life made students, teachers, and